Leviticus 5:5-6

And it shall be, when he shall be guilty in one of these things, that he shall confess that he hath sinned in that thing:  And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the Lord for his sin which he hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb or a kid of the goats, for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his sin.

John 20:19-23

Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.

And when He had so said, He shewed unto them His hands and His side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the Lord.

Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.

And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:

Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds.

In the church you shall acknowledge your transgressions, and you shall not come near for your prayer with an evil conscience. This is the way of life.

But every Lord's day [Sunday] gather yourselves together, and break bread, and give thanksgiving after having confessed your transgressions, that your sacrifice may be pure.

He who is ordained as a bishop, being chosen by all the people, must be irreproachable. When his name is announced and approved, the people will gather on the Lord's day with the council of elders and the bishops who are present. With the assent of all, the bishops will place their hands upon him, with the council of elders standing by, quietly.  Everyone will keep silent, praying in their hearts for the descent of the Spirit. After this, one of the bishops present, at the request of all, shall lay his hand upon him who is being ordained bishop, and pray, saying,

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Father of mercies and God of all consolation,
you who live in the highest, but regard the lowest,a
you who know all things before they are,
you who gave the rules of the Church through the word of your grace,
who predestined from the beginning the race of the righteous through Abraham,
who instituted princes and priests,
and did not leave your sanctuary without a minister;
who from the beginning of the world has been pleased
to be glorified by those whom you have chosen,
pour out upon him the power which is from you, the princely Spirit,
which you gave to your beloved Son Jesus Christ,
which he gave to your holy apostles,
who founded the Church in every place as your sanctuary,
for the glory and endless praise of your name.
Grant, Father who knows the heart,
to your servant whom you chose for the episcopate, that he will feed your holy flock,
that he will wear your high priesthood without reproach,
serving night and day, incessantly making your face favorable,
and offering the gifts of your holy church;
in the spirit of high priesthood having the power to forgive sins according to your command;
to assign lots according to your command;
to loose any bond according to the authority which you gave to the apostles;
to please you in mildness and a pure heart, offering to you a sweet scent,
through your son Jesus Christ,
through whom to you be glory, power, and honor,
Father and Son, with the Holy Spirit,
in the Holy Church,
now and throughout the ages of the ages. Amen.

28. Moreover, how much are they both greater in faith and better in their fear, who, although bound by no crime of sacrifice to idols or of certificate, yet, since they have even thought of such things, with grief and simplicity confess this very thing to God's priests, and make the conscientious avowal, put off from them the load of their minds, and seek out the salutary medicine even for slight and moderate wounds, knowing that it is written, God is not mocked. God cannot be mocked, nor deceived, nor deluded by any deceptive cunning. Yea, he sins the more, who, thinking that God is like man, believes that he evades the penalty of his crime if he has not openly admitted his crime. Christ says in His precepts, Whosoever shall be ashamed of me, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed.  And does he think that he is a Christian, who is either ashamed or afraid to be a Christian? How can he be one with Christ, who either blushes or fears to belong to Christ? He will certainly have sinned less, by not seeing the idols, and not profaning the sanctity of the faith under the eyes of a people standing round and insulting, and not polluting his hands by the deadly sacrifices, nor defiling his lips with the wicked food. This is advantageous to this extent, that the fault is less, not that the conscience is guiltless. He can more easily attain to pardon of his crime, yet he is not free from crime; and let him not cease to carry out his repentance, and to entreat the Lord's mercy, lest what seems to be less in the quality of his fault, should be increased by his neglect of atonement.

29. I entreat you, beloved brethren, that each one should confess his own sin, while he who has sinned is still in this world, while his confession may be received, while the satisfaction and remission made by the priests are pleasing to the Lord. Let us turn to the Lord with our whole heart, and, expressing our repentance for our sin with true grief, let us entreat God's mercy. Let our soul lie low before Him. Let our mourning atone to Him. Let all our hope lean upon Him. He Himself tells us in what manner we ought to ask. Turn to me, He says, with all your heart, and at the same time with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning; and rend your hearts, and not your garments. Let us return to the Lord with our whole heart. Let us appease His wrath and indignation with fastings, with weeping, with mourning, as He Himself admonishes us.

Consider, too, the point that he who has received the Holy Ghost has also received the power of forgiving and of retaining sin. For thus it is written: Receive the Holy Spirit: whosesoever sins you forgive, they are forgiven unto them, and whosesoever sins you retain, they are retained. So, then, he who has not received power to forgive sins has not received the Holy Spirit. The office of the priest is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and His right it is specially to forgive and to retain sins. How, then, can they claim His gift who distrust His power and His right?

For if any one will consider how great a thing it is for one, being a man, and compassed with flesh and blood, to be enabled to draw near to that blessed and pure nature, he will then clearly see what great honor the grace of the Spirit has vouchsafed to priests; since by their agency these rites are celebrated, and others nowise inferior to these both in respect of our dignity and our salvation. For they who inhabit the earth and make their abode there are entrusted with the administration of things which are in Heaven, and have received an authority which God has not given to angels or archangels. For it has not been said to them, Whatsoever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in Heaven, and whatsoever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven. They who rule on earth have indeed authority to bind, but only the body: whereas this binding lays hold of the soul and penetrates the heavens; and what priests do here below God ratifies above, and the Master confirms the sentence of his servants. For indeed what is it but all manner of heavenly authority which He has given them when He says, Whose sins ye remit they are remitted, and whose sins ye retain they are retained? What authority could be greater than this? The Father has committed all judgment to the Son? But I see it all put into the hands of these men by the Son.

Jude 1:11

Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core.

And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods. They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation. And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also. And there came out a fire from the Lord, and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense.

I should like to call attention to the following facts. During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. Many hundreds of patients have passed through my hands, the greater number being Protestants, a lesser number Jews, and not more than five or six believing Catholics. Among all my patients in the second half of life -- that is to say, over thirty-five -- there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.

Here, then, the clergyman stands before a vast horizon. But it would seem as if no one had noticed it. It also looks as though the Protestant clergyman of today were insufficiently equipped to cope with the urgent psychic needs of our age. It is indeed high time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join forces to meet this great spiritual task.

Here is a concrete example which goes to show how closely this problem touches us all. A little more than a year ago the leaders of the Christian Students’ Conference at Aarau [Switzerland] laid before me the question whether people in spiritual distress prefer nowadays to consult the doctor rather than the clergyman, and what are the causes of their choice. This was a very direct and very practical question. At the time I knew nothing more than the fact that my own patients obviously had consulted the doctor rather than the clergyman. It seemed to me to be open to doubt whether this was generally the case or not. At any rate, I was unable to give a definite reply. I therefore set on foot an inquiry, through acquaintances of mine, among people whom I did not know personally; I sent out a questionnaire which was answered by Swiss, German, and French Protestants, as well as by a few Catholics. The results are very interesting, as the following general summary shows. Those who decided for the doctor represented 57 per cent of the Protestants and only 25 per cent of the Catholics, while those who decided for the clergyman formed only 8 per cent of the Protestants as against 58 per cent of the Catholics These were the unequivocal decisions. The remaining 35 per cent of the Protestants could not make up their minds, while only 17 per cent of the Catholics were undecided.

You have heard that I said Roman Catholics are less threatened by neurosis than members of other religious confessions. Of course there are Catholic neurotics just as well as others, but it is a fact that in my forty years of experience I have had no more than six practising Catholics among my patients. Naturally I do not count all those who have been Catholics, or who say that they are Catholics but who do not practise; but of practising Catholics I have had not more than about six. That is also the experience of my colleagues. In Zurich we are surrounded by Catholic cantons; not quite two-thirds of Switzerland is Protestant and the rest is Catholic. And then we have on the frontier Southern Germany which is Catholic. So we should have a fair number of Catholic patients…

You find the least or the smallest number of complex manifestations in practising Catholics, far more in Protestants, and the most in Jews.

So there must be something in the Catholic Church which accounts for this peculiar fact. Of course, we think in the first place of confession.

The fact is that there are relatively few neurotic Catholics, and yet they are living under the same conditions as we do. They are presumably suffering from the same social conditions and so on, and so one would expect a similar amount of neurosis. There must be something in the cult, in the actual religious practice, which explains that peculiar fact that there are fewer complexes, or that these complexes manifest themselves much less in Catholics than in other people. That something, besides confession, is really the cult itself.